In Łódź, the infamous security officer Major
Adam Humer ordered his underlings to hold down the captured
insurgent cryptographic expert, Second Lieutenant Maria Hattowska
of the WiN. Then Humer stood on her chest and beat her on her
crotch with a steel-tipped whip. Humer applied similar methods
to another woman, the insurgent liaison Second Lieutenant Ruta
Czaplińska of the NZW. Aside from torturing many suspects,
he and his colleagues, including UB Second Lieutenant Tadeusz
Szymański, beat to death at least one independentist,
Tadeusz Łabędzki, whose “crime” was to
have edited underground publications.[73]

Between December 27, 1945, and January 26, 1946, the secret
police launched an anti-insurgent expedition in the area of
Drohiczyn. “Thirty-six persons were arrested. In many
villages people were beaten and tortured on the spot. The secret
police demanded the surrender of weapons by persons who often
had none.”[74]

From December 1945 through February 1946 the Communist counterintelligence
officer Jerzy S. tortured Wincenty O., a Gulag survivor, in
Koszalin. While serving under duress in Poland ’s Communist
military, Wincenty O. was denounced for spreading “enemy
propaganda,” i.e. complaining about the system. Jerzy
S. interrogated him at night, kicking his victim and beating
him with a wooden club. The man confessed and was sentenced
to 5 years in jail.[75]

On January 13, 1946, uniformed secret police troops of the
Internal Security Corps (Korpus Bezpieczeństwa
Wewnętrznego – KBW ) raided Mężenin
near Siedlce and Drohiczyn. They seized insurgent post commander
Edward Gregorczuk (“Bonawentura”) and two of his
soldiers, all of them seasoned anti-Nazi and anti-Communist
fighters. Gregorczuk “was subjected to incredibly cruel
torture. After he was terribly beaten, with his face massacred
and his bones broken, the UBP and the KBW drove him around
the area to force him to denounce members of the underground
to them. Gregorczuk refused to…. [and] he was killed
by functionaries the Communist terror apparatus… near
Miężenin.”[76]

In February 1946, in the county of Kraśnik, the NKVD
and UB arrested several hundred independentist sympathizers
in a massive sweep. They were then brought to the UB headquarters
in Kraśnik. According to an underground dispatch,

Everyone is accused of [illegal] possession of weapons.
However, because they do not have any weapons, no one confesses
to possessing any. The UB tries to force an inculpatory confession.
Namely, the detainee is laid out on a bench. Two UB-men or
bolsheviks [i.e., NKVD] sit on him. One sits on his head
and the other on his back. The third beats him on the heels
of his feet with a walking stick. On average one receives
1,000 blows on the heels. After such an interrogation, the
prisoner is unable either to walk or to stand because his
bones are shattered. Another way [to extract confessions]
is to pour water into one’s nose. Apart from this they
wave a gun before the prisoner’s eyes and threaten
to shoot him. In one instance, while issuing such threats,
a shot was fired and shattered the knee of the person under
interrogation.[77]

In March 1946, following the assassination of a local Communist
party apparatchik, the UB seized Albert Bil in Krzemień near
Szczecin. Bil had been a Home Army soldier in the Wilno area
but after mid-1945 he discontinued his insurgent activities
and had nothing to do with the assassination. His arrest was
an act of approximated terror, striking at a possible rather
than actual culprit. Alfred Zimmerman supervised the interrogation
of Bil. In the course of the interrogation of March 23, 1946,
the AK soldier had six of his teeth crushed with a pair of
pliers, needles jammed under his fingernails, and a chair leg
jammed into his rectum. Finally, Zimmerman ordered that Bil
be locked into “the barrel of truth,” a closed
container half-filled with feces. After a while, the man confessed
and was sentenced to 10 years.[78]

On April 15, 1946, the secret police arrested Piotr Kosobudzki,
an officer of the PAS NZW Łódź. He left the
following account of his ordeal:

The leading interrogator in our case was the Jewish officer
Frenkel. His assistant was a muscular ape named Bocheński.
Frankel sat behind the desk and asked questions. To stress
his own seriousness, he played with a pistol. Meanwhile,
Bocheński, foaming at the mouth, kept hitting me with
a stick [pała] on my head, repeating one word
over and over again: “talk, talk” or “sign
it, sign it”…. One time Bocheński broke
a police baton on my head, and then a massive chair. Finally,
he beat me with a chair leg….

One of my tormentors, a Jew named Zajdel, had a magnificent
way of proving false confessions right. He made me lay my
hands down on the table and he hit me with a rod [pręt]
on my nails. If I withdrew my hand, that meant to him that
I was not telling the truth.

During that interrogation they often changed their tactics
abruptly. They offered me a cigarette allegedly to calm my
nerves. When I took a drag on it once, they would box me
on my jaw so hard that the cigarette either was crushed between
my lips or fell down. They dubbed this procedure, in the
secret police swaggering jargon, “to let him smoke.”[79]

Occasionally, Frenkel was capable of being perfidiously “kind.” While
the tired executioner Bocheński rested on a chair, Frenkel “sympathized” with
my plight: “Do you think it would be hard for us to
announce that you died of blood infection?”[80]

On May 14, 1946, the UB men of Łomża arrested the
grade school teacher Halina Sawicka née Komorowska (“Jerychonka”)
in Cwaliny Duże. At seventeen, the woman joined the independentist
underground during the first Soviet occupation in 1939. She
continued her clandestine activities against the Nazis. During
the second Soviet occupation in 1945 she served as a local
liaison of the National Military Union and as a distributor
of the underground press. The search of her household failed
to yield any incriminating material. Nonetheless, Sawicka was
taken to Łomża where UB Lieutenant Eliasz Trokenheim
and his men beat her on the soles of her feet and repeatedly
hit her face, breaking two of her teeth. Then, the woman was
summarily sentenced to death in a mock trial at the UB headquarters
that lasted less than three minutes. Together with six other
victims, Sawicka was stood against a wall to be shot. Unexpectedly,
she and another prisoner, Domuratówna, were reprieved.
However, the five men suspected of independentist activities
were shot right then and there in front of the petrified Sawicka.
Still, the woman refused to confess.[81]

In May 1946, the Resistance Movement of the Home Army [ROAK]
unit of Wiktor Zacheusz Nowowiejski (“Jeż”)
freed one of its soldiers, Edmund Morawski (“Lipa”),
from a prison ward at the hospital in Przasnysz.[82] The
liberated insurgent was subsequently hidden at the farmstead
of Kazimierz Chrzanowski. Morawski had his legs burned and
smashed by the secret police and required urgent medical attention.
His host recalled that the insurgent “had unhealed wounds
on his feet and broken bones were protruding from his open
wounds… Throughout his incarceration he was kept in
a small cell. He was so exhausted by the interrogation that
he was in a critical state both physically and psychologically.”[83]

In Poznań, the Military Counterintelligence (Informacja
Wojskowa) officers routinely tortured their prisoners.
For example, between April and July 1946 Kazimierz S. was
kept in a basement filled with cold water. His interrogators
beat him with rifle butts and rubber truncheons and crushed
his fingers in the door crack. The military counterintelligence
also shot their prisoners summarily.[84]

On June 18, 1946, the secret police caught Henryk Jarząbek
(“Tolek”) of the Conspiratorial Polish Army (Konspiracyjne
Wojsko Polskie – KWP). While making the arrest,
the policemen killed his brother, Kazimierz. Subsequently,

I was taken to Kościszew and there at the manor house
the so-called interrogation commenced. Among other things,
they inserted my hand in the door crack, closing the door gradually
on it and crushing my fingers. Then they pushed a needle under
my fingernails. Next, I was taken to Piotrków Trybunalski,
where at the Military Intelligence headquarters I was interrogated
and constantly beaten with a whip.[85]

In July 1946 in Gdańsk, the UB captured Danuta Siedzikówna
(“Inka”). This seventeen-year-old girl served as
a medic with the insurgent unit of Major Zygmunt Szendzielarz
(“Łupaszko”). The UB men stripped her naked
during the interrogation sessions. She was “beaten and
abused.” The teenager stubbornly refused to confess.
Later, “Inka” refused to beg for clemency. She
was promptly sentenced to death and shot on August 28, 1946
.[86]

Antoni Jędraszek (“Żuk”) of the KWP
was arrested in August 1946 by the UB in Pabianice:

The so-called investigation was conducted by several thugs,
usually drunk, who bragged that they were ‘the Polish
Gestapo.’ They were sadists without any conscience or
consideration. They beat me all over my body… They beat
me with their fists, a whip, and a stick. They kicked me. When
I lost consciousness, they poured water over me. The fate of
the victim depended on the mood of the UB men. Often they beat
and tortured me for fun and pleasure, and to fulfill their
bestial desires. One time during an interrogation session they
beat me so much that I lost consciousness. I was dragged out
on the corridor and doused with a bucket of cold water. After
I regained my senses, wobbling on my feet, I attempted to get
a drink of water. Then one of the torturers, called Obierzałek,
kicked me and said: ‘for you, you fascist, there is no
water in people’s Poland.’ They dragged me by
my legs back to my cell…. As a result of such methods
of total terror, a human being slowly became an inert mass
of meat incapable of controlling his feelings and thoughts… Therefore
the confessions, prepared by a secret policeman, were full
of contradictions. This caused more interrogation sessions
and torture and so on. Finally, one signed anything that
one was given, without any reading, or making any corrections.
Every correction or objection meant a new round of beating
and torture.[87]

The superior officer of Jarząbek and Jędraszek,
Lieutenant Jan Nowak (“Cis”) was arrested on September
14, 1946. Subjected to cruel torture, Nowak confessed on
October 11, 1946, and was sentenced to death. This sentence
was later commuted to 15 years.[88]

In October 1946 the UB arrested 18-year old Tadeusz Sikorski
and his sister Władysława Sikorska-Żórawska
of Lipinki near Tuchola. Both had served in the Pomeranian
Gryphon (Gryf Pomorski) and, later, the AK; Tadeusz
had also survived torture by the Gestapo and imprisonment at
the Stutthof concentration camp. After the war the siblings
cooperated with the unit of Władysław Heliński
(“Mały”) which was subordinated to the “Łupaszko” squadrons.
One of the partisans was arrested by the secret police and
broke down during the interrogation, implicating the Sikorski
family. During an earlier raid of their farmstead on June 3,
1946, the UB shot their older brother Jan, who was an insurgent
commander. Next, the secret police seized Tadeusz and Władysława.
The UB “beat [us] more than the Gestapo.” Both
siblings were tortured and sentenced to jail. He received eight
years, and his sister nine.[89]

Upon his arrest, Piotr Woźniak, an officer of the AK
and NZW, was first forced to stand at attention non-stop for
24 hours. Next, he was interrogated continuously for 72 hours.
According to his memoirs,

When on the second day various methods of psychological
pressure failed, Capt. Gajda and his superior… attacked me. I
was hit on the face…, and again. I briefly passed out
and my legs buckled but I did not fall. Then I received dozens
of blows to my head, face, chest, and the entire upper portion
of my torso. After a while I could not hear anything but buzz
in my ears, pain in my head, and the room floated and fell
with me. I think I was on the floor…. After a brief
rest…., Gajda began to kick me with his jackboot on
my shin, systematically from my foot up to my knee….
His face reflected either sadism or drug addiction. He was
hitting me and smiled with a satanic grin as if deriving pleasure
from the torture. After many blows, the skin on my legs was
completely torn off. Gaping and bleeding wounds formed, and
after a score of hours my legs swelled enormously. I could
not stand up although they were forcing me with kicks to do
just that…. When that did not work and I continued to
refuse to confess, they turned to another, more effective type
of torture. They used a metal rod covered with rubber to beat
me on the soles of my feet… I felt at that time that
my brain would explode under my skull…. I could not
get up on my feet, so I was crawling on my hands and knees.
And then the ubowcy [UB-men] kicked me anywhere they
could as if I were an inanimate object.[90]

In August 1946, the UB apprehended
Lieutenant Edward Bzymek-Strzałkowski
(“Swoboda”), who led the intelligence arm of Freedom
and Independence (WiN). He was tortured cruelly and, consequently,
attempted suicide by plunging headlong from a third floor window
at the police headquarters. Bzymek-Strzałkowski survived,
albeit completely crippled. While delirious at the prison hospital
in Cracow, he was drugged and his interrogators successfully
forced him to confess his “crimes.”[91] His
liaison, Stanisława Rachwał (“Zygmunt”),
was seized in Warsaw on October 30, 1946, and tortured for
eleven months before being sentenced to death.[92]

On October 23, 1946, after a fire fight, the KBW and UBP
captured two wounded insurgents hiding at a farmstead near
Tuchola, Pommerania. One of them, Bolesław Pałubicki
(“Zawisza”) broke down under torture and provided
his captors with the names of 35 civilian supporters who were
promptly arrested.[93]

Between November 1946 and January 1947, in Krosno, the secret
policeman Bronisław P. “in order to force the arrested
Jan M., a former soldier of the AK and member of the WiN, to
talk beat him many times during his interrogation, forced him
to sit on the leg of a stool, inserted his fingers in a door
crack and then he [the secret policeman] would slam the door.” In
the case of the AK soldier Jan G., the security man “beat
him with a cable until the man fainted, …forced him
to hop around while holding his ankles,” and forbade
him “to use the toilet.” He also dragged his victim
by the ankles down the stairs.[94]

On December 21, 1946, the UB arrested the peasant Aleksander
Florczuk of Kolonia Kamieńczyk. He was tortured and confessed
that for one night, on December 12, 1946, he sheltered and
fed a 12-man strong insurgent detachment of Captain Władysław Łukasiuk
(“Młot”) of the AK-WiN. On December 23, 1946,
Florczuk was formally charged and shot the following day, Christmas
Eve, following a “trial” that lasted
an hour.[95]

Henryk Łoś (“Tur”) served in the AK-
NOW -NZW units of Second Lieutenant Stanisław Pelczar
(“Majka”) and Józef Zadzierski (“Wołyniak”).
In January 1947,

I went into hiding. The militia and the NKVD observed my
house and when I came by once they arrested me and took me
to the [police] post in Krzeszów. They beat me there,
mostly with an iron rod on the soles of my feet. I was only
able to stand on my toes. They tied up my hands and legs and
suspended me on a beam. They poured water into my nose and
gagged my mouth….. The militiamen [Jan] Hasiak… and… [Jan]
Tryka beat me the most…. I said to him [i.e. Tryka]: ‘I
saved your life [by having freed him earlier from insurgent
captivity], and you are beating me.’ It made no impression
on him.[96]

The secret police subjected Mirosław Ostromęcki
of the NSZ to sleep deprivation, starvation, psychological
torture, and beating. After falling seriously ill, the victim
was hospitalized only to be abruptly taken out of the infirmary
and thrown into a tiny, freezing cell with a low-celing filled
with excrement. Ostromęcki soon confessed and was sentenced
to death. His sentence was later commuted to life in prison.[97]

For participating in the underground scouting movement of
the AK, Marian Barcikowski was imprisoned by the Nazis in Pińczów
in 1944. Two years later he was arrested by the UB and NKVD
and incarcerated in the same jail along with some friends. “The
interrogation methods we were subjected to were more refined
than those of the Gestapo. The ‘arguments’ used
during the interrogation sessions included: the leg of a chair,
a hard rubber truncheon, the rifle butt of a sub-machine gun,
being kicked all over our bodies, and being beaten by fist.
Each time we were tortured until we lost consciousness.”[98]

Between 1946 and 1948 UB man Józef S. of Rzeszów
tortured at least 20 insurgents of the AK-WiN and NOW -NZW.
Beating and kicking his victims was the norm as was food and
sleep deprivation. Józef S. further delighted in stripping
his prisoners naked and exposing them to extreme winter conditions
in an unheated solitary cell.[99]

On May 8, 1947, Cavalry Captain Witold Pilecki was seized
by the UB. Pilecki fought the Nazis in 1939 and joined the
underground afterwards. In 1941 he volunteered to be arrested
and sent to Auschwitz, so he could report to his superiors
about the camp. Eventually, Pilecki escaped from the camp and
fought the Germans as a Home Army officer. Taken prisoner,
he survived a POW camp and joined the Free Polish Forces in
the West. Dispatched back to Poland, he was promptly arrested
and charged with espionage. The UB men not only tore off his
fingernails but also beat him, starved him, and held him in
solitary confinement. Following six months of brutal interrogation,
on November 4, 1947, Pilecki confessed to being a “Gestapo
agent” and a “spy for [General] Anders.” He
was shot soon after.[100]

In July 1947 the secret police arrested a prominent Nationalist
politician, Adam Doboszyński. His only “crime” was
that he returned from the West hoping to persuade the insurgents
to cease their armed struggle. Instead, the Communists accused
him of being an American and British spy and, of course, “collaborating
with the Hitlerites,” an absurd charge in the light of
Doboszyński’s anti-German ideology, exemplary anti-Nazi
combat record, and the fact that between 1940 and 1945 he served
with distinction in the Polish Armed Forces in France and England.[101] Before
he was shot for his “crimes,” the politician informed
the court about his ordeal with the secret police:

The moment came when the interrogating authorities presented
the charge of my [alleged] collaboration with the German
intelligence service… I resisted for a long time and I did not want
to confess to something that is not true… I continued
to struggle. Then they applied physical pressure against me….
I was beaten and tortured for four days and nights non-stop… After
four days and nights, seeing that at best the torment will
ruin my health, and therefore even an acquittal would be worthless,
I decided to confess to deeds that I had never committed and
to withdraw my confession at the first opportune moment, i.e.
during the first public trial…. The investigation
lasted two more years. I had to continue incriminating myself
because they threatened that the torture would start again.[102]

Second Lieutenant Michał Biebrzyński (“Sęp”)
of the NZW Łomża surrendered to the Communists during
the amnesty in April 1947. He was arrested on September 5,
1947, tortured, tried, and sentenced to death, but later
had his sentence commuted to life. Bierzyński recalls
his ordeal at the Security Office in Łomża

One night sometime in October or November the doors to my
cell opened… “Get out,” they told me.
They did not take me upstairs anymore but to an empty room
downstairs. There were whips, sticks, chains, and handcuffs
hanging on the wall. There were two wooden support beams
[kozły]
standing there, and a long log. They tied my hands. They pulled
up a chair and made me sit on it. They placed my knees between
my legs and inserted the log under my knees. There were four
thugs.

“Up!” They shouted. They lifted me up and I
immediately turned upside down. Then they rested each end
of the log on the support beams. And I was dangling down
on it. It started to hurt me so much that I asked them to
kill me:

“Shoot me, gentlemen, do not murder me this way.” After
a while I heard a noise and next thing I felt was that they
were shoving a funnel into my nose. And they were pouring something
into it. Well, I was convinced I was drowning. Water kept streaming
out of my ears and everywhere. They were yelling but I could
not hear exactly. I only heard: “Confess, confess, you
bandit!” Then they kicked me a few times and threw
me down on the floor. I was untied, dragged on the floor,
and propped up against the wall. The rest of the water flew
out of me and they asked me:

“OK, are you going to confess?” That’s how
it’s going to be all day long. “You are to denounce
everyone. Where is the county commander? Where is the district
commander? Where is your contact place? Where are your hiding
places? Tell us everything!” I did not tell them anything
however because I knew that after I surrendered all contact
spots and contact people were changed.

Because I did not tell them anything, they fell on me.
They beat me almost unconscious right away. Even before I
answered, they beat me, and then beat me some more. When
I came to, regained some of my strength, they lifted me up
and one of them said: “Get
out,” and again, holding me under my arms, they dragged
me to my cell.[103]

In November 1947 in Cracow,
the UB captured Captain Franciszek Błażej, the propaganda head of the WiN. “He
was beaten for so long that his body started to rot and gangrene
set in.” The victim broke down and confessed.[104]

A Catholic priest recalled his ordeal with the UB, following
a ten-day long torture session:

At one point… I still reflexively comprehended the
situation because, crying like a child, I stressed that
my mother had taught me to do right and brought me up to
be an honest man. Finally, however, I broke down and testified
that I was indeed a spy. I confessed to such nonsense that
my confession reflects best that I was not of a right mind.[105]

Secret police Captain Roman Laszkiewicz,
dubbed the “white
executioner of the Mokotów jail” (biały
kat Mokotowa) by his prisoners, handled the case of Andrzej
Leśniewski, who was an opposition PSL journalist and a
former AK officer. Leśniewski was framed in a scheme involving
a non-existent underground group, contrived in a classical
secret police provocation in October 1947. Laszkiewicz interrogated
Leśniewski and his father Wiktor. The son was beaten and
kicked as well as forced to do hundreds of sit-ups and to stand
naked at attention in sub-zero temperature. The father was
interrogated non-stop for 100 hours. “The torturers broke
his fingers and beat him with a baton and a steel rod.” Also,
the AK-NOW officer and nationalist politician, Leon Mirecki,
was beaten with sticks and wires and forced to stand naked
at attention in a freezing cell without any windows by UB Lieutenant
Colonel Józef Światło.[106]

In Warsaw, in August 1947, the UB arrested Jan Radożycki
of the AK and the SN, who had been active in Sanok. Radożycki
was questioned by two security men:

they began to beat me on my back, face, and hit my head
against the wall, while swearing at me horribly. Finally,
I was made to sit on the leg of an upturned stool in such
a manner that it jammed against my hind bone, which caused
me great pain. After a short while, I fainted and fell on
the floor. They poured cold water over me and sat me down
once again on that leg. As before, I fell to the floor…. I decided to confess
to belonging to the SN [but refused to name names]… Therefore
they started to beat me all over the place…. and to
stomp on my toes with jackboots. They also forced me to do
sit-ups. Finally, they locked me up in the so-called nest
[dziupla].
That was a small chest where one could not move for lack
of space… I spent about 24 hours there which brought me
to the edge of my sanity. I prayed, I thought about various
things, but I was about to break down… The following
day… they beat me again everywhere; they stood me
at attention with my hands up until I fainted. They forced
me to do sit-ups and, finally, they put me on the stool leg
which, as before, caused me to faint and fall to the ground.[107]

Arrested in the fall of 1947,
after he had surrender during an amnesty, Major Zbigniew Kulesza
(“Młot”),
a leading NZW commander from Northern Mazovia, underwent mostly
psychological torture. Marathon interrogation sessions and
sleep deprivation were the norm. He was tortured physically
only three times, including once almost fatally, which landed
him in a prison hospital. However, to break down his resistance,
the UB simultaneously interrogated and tortured his wife, Barbara,
in an adjacent room. Kulesza was sentenced to life for “espionage.”[108]

The secret police caught insurgent Major Hieronim Dekutowski
(“Zapora”) in the fall of 1947. Dekutowski had
been in the field since 1939. He fought with the Free Polish
Forces in the West and was parachuted as a commando into Nazi-occupied
Poland in 1943. From 1944, he began fighting the Communists.
Upon his capture by the UB, Dekutowski was tortured horribly
and sentenced to death at a sham trial on November 15, 1948
. The act of judicial murder was carried out half a year later.
According to an account,

on the evening of March 7, 1949, the red executioners came
to the cell in the Mokotów prison to get Major ‘Zapora,’ Hieronim
Dekutowski, who was a commando [cichociemny] and
a bearer of [Poland’s most coveted] Virtuti Militari
cross. He was thirty years, five months, and eleven days
old. He looked like an old man: grey hair, missing teeth
that had been knocked out of his mouth [by the interrogators],
broken nose, hands, and ribs. His fingernails had been torn
off [during torture]. ‘We
shall never surrender!’ he yelled sending his last
message to his fellow prisoners. According to documents,
the sentence was carried out by shooting.[109]

Between January 1947 and December
1949 in Wieluń, UB
officer Tadeusz R. tortured at least six persons connected
to the insurgent Conspiratorial Polish Army (KWP), including
Stefan Kaczmarek, Franciszek Gąsior, Józef Musiał,
and Antoni Teodorczyk. The prisoners were beaten with “a
fist, a stick, a steel rod and other tools all over their bodies.
Some of them were placed in a cellar, which was filled with
water. Others were tied up and had water poured down their
nostrils and throat until they fainted.”[110]

Father (Lieutenant Colonel) Józef Zator-Przytocki
fought as a military chaplain in 1939. Later, he joined the
independentist underground under the Soviet occupation in Stanisławów.
He fled the NKVD in 1940 to the Nazi-occupied part of Poland,
where he continued his clandestine activities in the Home Army
in the Kraków area. After the return of the Soviets
to Poland in 1945, Father Zator-Przytocki escaped to Gdańsk
. He was arrested by the UB on September 5, 1948. Tortured
horribly (including beating and isolation in a cell where the
temperature was below the freezing point), he refused to break
down. His faith guided him: “I’m a soldier of the
Catholic Church. I must always and everywhere maintain an inner
balance. I cannot give in to pessimism. I must endure everything
with calm.” He survived his imprisonment albeit with
greatly damaged health.[111]

Home Army soldier Wacław Gluth-Nowowiejski joined an
informal university student group called “Keep Smiling” in
Warsaw. He discontinued armed struggle out of deference to
his mother: Wacław was the only surviving of four siblings,
three of his brothers having been killed during the war. Further,
he sustained a serious wound in his forearm during the Warsaw
Uprising of 1944. Gluth-Nowowiejski nonetheless maintained
a loose contact with his comrades in the anti-Communist insurgency,
caching weapons for Wojciech Kostkiewicz of the WiN “Orlik” unit
in May 1948. Soon after, the UB captured Kostkiewicz and tortured
him into revealing fifteen persons who had assisted him. Gluth-Nowowiejski
was seized in November 1948. The secret police falsely assumed
that “Keep Smiling” was a Western spy group. The
UB men forced Wiesław to do sit-ups, kicked him, and beat
him. When Gluth-Nowowiejski was unable to stand the torture
anymore, he would shield his head with his wounded forearm.
A blow to the wound invariably assured an immediate loss of
consciousness. He was sentenced to eight years in a show trial.[112]

[79]
A play on words: “Dać mu popalić,” i.e. “kick
the crap out of him.” [UP]

[80]
Piotr Kosobudzki, Przez druty, kraty i kajdany: Wspomnienia
partyzanta NSZ (Wrocław: Wydawnictwo "Nortom,” 1997),
249-50. Kosobudzki was sentenced to two years in jail but escaped
after 13 months. While being transported to another jail, he
broke the window with his head and jumped out from a moving
train. He hid until 1950. Ibid., 251, 259, 296. [UP]

[81] Sawicka
was released shortly after but she was re-arrested on June
7, 1949. Again, she refused to confess and was let go. Meanwhile,
the UB arrested her husband, who edited and disseminated
an underground newsheet. He was subjected to torture and
later sentenced to five years of forced labor in a coal mine.
He served three years but upon his release he was denied
employment as an “enemy of
the people.” A dispatch by the Communist civilian authorities
concerning her arrest misidentified Halina Sawicka-Komorowska
as “Jadwiga Komorowska.” See UWB, WSP, do MAP,
DP, 5 June 1945, APB, UWB, file 496, 103; Postanowienie, 2
September 1993, Sąd Wojewódzki w Łomży,
file II Ko 250/93 (a copy in my collection); Halina Sawicka,
interview by Marek Jan Chodakiewicz, Łomża, 19 July
2001. [UP]

[82] In
December 1945, Morawski led a successful rescue operation,
freeing 14 insurgents from a militia outpost in Chorzele,
and he participated in most operations of Lt. Nowowiejski’s
unit. Captured by the UB and tortured, he withstood torture
initially but when his tormentors threathened to kill him,
Morawski feigned willingness to collaborate. He was therefore
transferred to a prison ward of the local hospital to recuperate.
However, Morawski secretly sent a message out for help to
his confederates and was freed by them in a daring action.
See Krajewski et al., Żołnierze
wyklęci, 129. [UP]

[92] Rachwał was one
of the most intrepid underground fighters. The wife of a military
and later police commissioned officer and a Piłsudskite,
she was first arrested by the NKVD in Stanisławów
in October 1939. After escaping from the Soviet zone, she joined
the Union for Armed Struggle (ZWZ) in Cracow in January 1940.
Rachwał was then caught by the Gestapo in May 1941. She
withstood the torture and was bought out of jail by the underground.
She was re-arrested on October 13, 1942, and shipped off to
Auschwitz on December 1, 1942. She continued her underground
work in the camps, including Ravensbrück and Neustadt-Gleve.
Liberated by the British in May 1945, Rachwał returned
to Poland where she re-joined the underground (DSZ-WiN Intelligence
Brigades). She was recognized in Warsaw by UB Colonel Leon
Ajzen-Andrzejewski whose wife, Krystyna Żywulska, was
her campmate in Auschwitz. On September 29, 1947, Rachwał was
senteced to life but during her next trial, on December 30,
1947, she received a death sentence, which was however changed
to life by an act of clemency on February 14, 1948. On May
10, 1955, her sentence was reduced to 15 years but, finally,
Rachwał was released during the amnesty on October 30,
1956. See Filip Musiał, “Stanisława Rachwał,” Zeszyty
do historii WiN-u, vol. 11, no. 17 (June 2002): 301-305. [UP]